Power Line Daily Digest - What really ails our cites

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• What really ails our cites
• Fidel Castro: Greediest Tyrant In World History?
• Bubbaships and Double Standards*
• Jerry Brown hot and cold
• "Clinton Cash": Disputations

What really ails our cites Posted: 10 May 2015 02:23 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) My impression is that Baltimore was particularly hard hit by the last recession and hasn't really recovered. But, as I have argued, this doesn't mean that cities hit less hard are immune from the kind of rioting that followed the death of Freddie Gray. Colbert King of the Washington Post makes this point. He contends that Washington, D.C., which is nearly recession-proof, shares the same basic ills as Baltimore, and thus could easily erupt. What are the "ills" King identifies as common to Baltimore and Washington? Relying on figures from Peter Tatian of the Urban Institute, King cites the following: Births to teen mothers; families headed by single women; violent crime; where police recorded gunshots; people age 25 and older without high school diplomas; the unemployed; people living below the poverty line; and welfare and food stamp recipients. There is no mention here of incidents of police brutality or, indeed, of any police conduct other than the entirely passive act of "recording gunshots." (Later in his column, King mentions juvenile arrests, but does not suggest that the police force is in any way to blame for them). King, a liberal African-American, thus recognizes the reality I noted immediately following Gray's death: the Baltimore protests are not really about the police. As he puts it, the ills of Baltimore and Washington "exist without factoring in police relations."  I would take this analysis one step further. It is difficult to imagine how community relations with the police force, whatever its racial composition, can be other than rocky given the ills King cites. After all, the police force bears the nearly impossible burden of maintaining some semblance of order in neighborhoods plagued by social pathology, family destruction and generations of dependency. In this context, as King correctly concludes, reforming the criminal justice system is largely beside the point if we're talking about what really ails our cities.

Fidel Castro: Greediest Tyrant In World History? Posted: 10 May 2015 01:17 PM PDT (John Hinderaker) We noted years ago that Fidel Castro ranked high on Forbes' list of the richest people in the world with unearned wealth. As his economic policies forced his countrymen into increasingly desperate poverty, Castro himself has lived for decades like a pasha. It is doubtful whether any of history's rogues gallery of warlords and tyrants has ever stolen a larger portion of his country's wealth than Fidel Castro. Now more of the story is told by Fidel's former bodyguard, Juan Reinaldo Sanchez, who worked for the dictator for 17 years and escaped to the U.S. in 2008. Sanchez has now written a book titled The Double Life of Fidel Castro. The book is excerpted in the New York Post.  It contains lots of entertaining information, like that fact that Castro maintains his own private hospital, where two people who share his blood type are housed. Just in case. And his family has its own herd of cows, with one cow assigned to each member of the family to precisely match that person's taste in milk. But most interesting is Sanchez's description of Castro's private island: On the west side of the island, facing the setting sun, the Castros had built a 200-foot-long landing stage for his personal yacht. The Aquarama II, decorated entirely in exotic wood imported from Angola, had four engines from Soviet navy patrollers, a gift from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. … To allow Aquarama II to dock, Fidel and Dalia had also had a half-mile-long channel dug; without this, their flotilla would not have been able to reach the island, surrounded by sand shoals. … A floating pontoon, 23 feet long, had been annexed to it, and on the pontoon stood a straw hut with a bar and barbecue grill. From this floating bar and restaurant, everyone could admire the sea enclosure in which, to the delight of adults and children alike, turtles (some 3 feet long) were kept. On the other side of the landing stage was a dolphinarium containing two tame dolphins that livened up our daily routines with their pranks and jumps. … From 1977 to 1994, I accompanied him many hundreds of times to the little paradise of Cayo Piedra, where I took part in as many fishing or underwater hunting expeditions. Hardly anyone was allowed to set foot on Fidel's private island, not even his own brothers. He did host potentates from Communist countries there, like East Germany's Erich Honecker. A few close personal friends were allowed onto the island, like Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Anyone else? Oh yes, Ted Turner and Barbara Walters. We will have to try to get Sanchez as a guest on the Power Line show.

Bubbaships and Double Standards* Posted: 10 May 2015 12:15 PM PDT (Steven Hayward) I know it's a favorite saying around here that if liberals didn't have double standards they wouldn't have any standards at all.  But seriously—the Clintons really abuse the liberal privilege. The astounding revelations of Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash are causing me to have flashbacks to the 1990s, and such sterling paragons of commercial virtue like Marc Rich, the Riadys of Indonesia, assorted impecunious Buddhist monks who nonetheless managed to max out campaign contributions, Charlie Trie, John Huang, Cheech & Chong, and whoever else they managed to troll. At least Nixon's alleged financial scandals involved Howard Hughes and ITT—and he never pardoned Robert Vesco. If you Google "Clinton scandals," you get 1.5 million hits. "Hillary Clinton scandals" is already up to more than 1 million hits, so she's got a head start such that room rates for the Lincoln Bedroom are surely going to skyrocket if she wins. Do we really want to have another administration like this? If this was anyone else but the Clintons wouldn't the media and Democratic establishment be all over it? Maybe this is just further proof that the Democratic Party really is nothing more than a criminal conspiracy protection racket, and the Clinton Family has achieved Godfather status. * "Bubbaships and Double Standards" is indeed a play on Jeane Kirkpatrick's famous article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," in which she exposed the hypocrisy of the left on international human rights.

Jerry Brown hot and cold Posted: 10 May 2015 08:37 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Steven Goddard's Real Science site has a hilarious update on the catastrophes attributed to global warming climate change (f/k/a global cooling). Goddard draws on the timely example of California's current drought, exacerbated by California's state government. See, for example, Victor Davis Hanson's "The scorching of Califoria" and, most recently, "An engineered drought." There is in the true sense nothing funny about it. In an almost unbelievable example of history rhyming, we have, courtesy of Goddard, Jerry Brown then and now: "40 years since climatologists blamed California drought on global cooling." In 1976 then Governor Brown warned that California's drought threatened "a disaster of immeasurable magnitude." The New York Times quoted climatologists attributing the drought to "global cooling." Brown took the opportunity to tout "an era of limits." Now, of course, Brown is governor again and California is facing a catastrophic drought. Seemingly, some things never change. Here, however, we have repetition with a difference. Brown is somewhat chary about linking the current drought to global warming climate change, but, as the Atlantic's Adam Chandler points out, he takes the crisis as an opportunity to push the standard proposals to deal with the alleged phenomenon. And only last month Brown appeared on ABC's This Week with the Democratic Operative to proclaim that the unprecedented drought and newly enacted state water restrictions show that "climate change is not a hoax." The climate is always changing, but this proposition represents an eternal verity: whatever the problem, for liberals like Brown, government regulation and economic impoverishment are the solution.

"Clinton Cash": Disputations Posted: 10 May 2015 07:53 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Peter Schweizer generated an enormous amount of publicity for Clinton Cash before its official publication this past Tuesday. The prepublication publicity included the related New York Times story by Jo Becker and Mike McIntire "Cash flowed to Clinton Foundation amid Russian uranium deal." The Times has gone silent since the publication of that story.  The Clinton machine is now cranking up the war room to hit back. The participation of major media outlets like the Times has complicated the traditional Clintonian approach, but it has only slowed it down a bit. Emily Schultheis reports on the pushback in "Hillary Clinton's campaign declares war against Clinton Cash." The Clinton team has put together a 42-page document on the book: "Clinton Cash debunked." Best of all so far is campaign spokesman Brian Fallon's video response (below). It is posted on YouTube as "Fact-checking Clinton Cash." It is a bit long on assertion and short in the Department of Fact. After checking out the video, please check out the our podcast interview with Peter (below). It helps to put Fallon's video in context. A lot of the discussion is devoted to matters related to Frank Giustra. That's pronounced Juice-tra. As with the name of the late Frank Zappa, Giustra's name seems to reflect a joking refrence to a deep truth about the nature of the game that is afoot. Now comes the Wall Street Journal's James Freeman to review Schweizer's book in "There's money to be made" (accessible here via Google). Freeman warms up with this interesting observation: The Clintons' most lucrative transactions originate not in places like Germany or Great Britain, where business and politics are kept separate by stringent ethical rules and procedures," writes Mr. Schweizer, "but in despotic areas of the developing world where the rules are very different." He then takes us on a world tour of business magnates writing large checks to the Clintons or their foundation and receiving favorable treatment from various governmental bodies—including the U.S. Department of State where Mrs. Clinton served from 2009 to 2013. Where the particular government required to help a Clinton associate was of the less democratic variety, the favorable treatment was sometimes accompanied by Bill Clinton effusively praising the local strongman for his enlightened rule. Case in point: Take Kazakhstan, where Mr. Clinton presented himself in 2005 as an ambassador for low-cost treatment of HIV/AIDS. Mr. Schweizer notes that it was an odd place to focus such an effort, since Kazakh infection rates were very low. But the country did have plenty of uranium. And a Canadian company with little experience in the uranium business—but led by a generous Clinton donor—scored a coup when it gained lucrative stakes in Kazakh uranium mines. After a series of deals, the resulting company controlled uranium mines all over the world and was eventually sold to the Russian atomic energy agency. This last deal required the approval of a U.S. government committee that included Mrs. Clinton's State Department and resulted in Russian control of sizable uranium supplies in the U.S. The story has generated major headlines, in part because Mr. Schweizer discovered more than $2 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation from the foundation of Canadian mining magnate Ian Telfer, who was among those profiting from the deal. These donations were not reported by the Clinton Foundation, breaking disclosure promises made to the Obama administration when Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state. The uranium deal is among the biggest, ugliest transactions in the book—not just because of the millions that flowed to Clinton-related entities but also because it gave Vladimir Putin control of much of the world's supply of an essential ingredient for nuclear energy and weapons. Yet it's just one float in the global parade of Clinton pals engaging in politically connected investments in exotic locales. Check out the podcast for more.    This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now